TL;DR: GitHub gives every organization a markdown page that renders at the top of its profile, and almost nobody uses it for anything except a mission statement. We replaced ours with a curated hub pointing straight at awesome-growth-hacking-skills: agentic growth-hacking skills a developer can drop into Claude, ChatGPT or Manus that afternoon. Twelve days later the repo had 835 stars, climbing day over day instead of spiking once. One file. No ads.
A castle wall with a window left open
GitHub is where developers spend their working hours, and the org profile sits on the path between a search result and a repo. People arrive there mid-decision: is this team serious, do they ship, is there anything here I would use on Monday. That is a lot of intent to hand a one-line bio.
What we noticed is that the attention was already arriving. It just had nowhere to land. Visitors read the sentence, scanned six pinned repos with names that mean nothing without context, and left. The platform hands you a full markdown canvas at the exact moment someone is deciding whether you are worth a star, and most teams fill it with the same paragraph that sits on their website footer.
The crack was not in GitHub's ranking. It was in the gap between how much intent lands on a profile and how little most profiles do with it.
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What we actually shipped
The centrepiece is awesome-growth-hacking-skills, a curated index of agentic growth-hacking skills for Claude, ChatGPT and Manus, and the profile README was rewritten as the doorway into it. The rule we set for ourselves: every line has to be useful to someone who has never heard of us.
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| The skills index | Every skill listed with one line saying what it does for you, not what it is built with. |
| Copy-paste install | The exact block to drop a skill into Claude, ChatGPT or Manus, no setup narrative. |
| Research | Direct links to the growth-hack write-ups behind each skill, newest first, so the page changes every week. |
| One ask | A single quiet line: star the repo to get the next skill. |
Two details mattered more than the structure. First, benefit-first descriptions. "Rewrites AI-sounding copy into something a person would send" gets a click; "a markdown-based skill package" does not. Second, freshness. Because new skills land every week, the repo is worth revisiting, and a repo worth revisiting is worth starring.
It is all public. Open github.com/mikiarlo3/awesome-growth-hacking-skills and read the structure directly - clone it, swap in your own resources, keep the top of the list fresh.
The numbers
Before the rewrite, our repos averaged fewer than 5 new stars a week, most of them from people who had already met us. In the 12 days since it went up, awesome-growth-hacking-skills has taken 835, and the curve was flat-steady rather than one viral Tuesday. That shape matters: it means the page itself is converting traffic that was already arriving, not riding a single link that happened to travel.
| Window | New stars |
|---|---|
| Our earlier repos, any given 12 days | ~8 |
| awesome-growth-hacking-skills, first 12 days | 835 |
Forks and opened issues rose alongside the stars, which told us people were clicking through and actually installing skills rather than collecting badges. We tracked stars on GitHub's own insights view and click-throughs to the linked articles in our analytics.
| What we are claiming | How to check it |
|---|---|
| Repository created 4 August 2026 | Public repo history on GitHub |
| 835 stars as of 16 August 2026 (12 days) | Star count and stargazers list on the repo |
| The metric is repository stars | Not personal or org follower counts, which are a separate and much smaller number |
One honest caveat, because we have been asked: this is a 12-day window on a brand-new repository, not a mature account effect. The personal GitHub account that hosts it has a two-digit follower count, so none of this came from an existing audience on that profile. Stars are the only number we are attributing to the README rewrite, and the repo is public if you want to audit the curve yourself.
Where it underperformed
Contributions barely moved. We got attention, stars, and a few issues, but new pull requests from these visitors stayed close to zero. A curated index can win interest. It cannot ask someone to spend a weekend in your codebase. That conversion needs its own touchpoints, which is what we are testing next through release notes and repo discussions.
If you want to run it this week
Pick the one thing your team knows that a stranger could use on Monday, and publish it as a curated index repo the way we did with awesome-growth-hacking-skills. Treat the README as a landing page rather than an about page. Keep one section that changes weekly so returning visitors see movement. Ask for the star once, in plain words, at the bottom.
It costs an afternoon and it keeps paying, because the traffic was already walking past. The full research write-up has the section-by-section template, the measurement setup, and what we would do differently.